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January 28, 2004
Marriage and all that Jazz
My interest in this matter is only peripheral. It does, however, seem to me like the opposition to state-sanctioned gay marriage is a clear wrong, and I have a duty to not remain silent on it. So here it is:
Humans are, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions, social animals. When we have the means to do so, we will tend to form communities. In fact, that "tend to" may be more like "inevitably". Stick several dozen people onto an otherwise deserted island, and they'll have laws within a few years. Humans have societies...
And the backbone, perhaps the smallest indivisible unit of a society is a family. Families come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with just about as many forms of it as there are societies. But in general, families are formed when the state recognizes it in the form of marriage...
The vast majority of human beings who have ever married did so because their parents chose a spouse for them that would best meet the goals of the parents in question. Divorcing ones self from this situation has been more or less easy depending on various factors, but by and large when humans got married, it was because their parents picked their partner...
This system tends to work fairly well. Humans, by and large, can get along with a fairly wide variety of people, and there are psychological mechanisms built in to our system that allow us to come to rather appreciate total strangers if we are forced to live with them forever...
Then about 3-400 years ago a funny thing happenedLove matches (which were not by any means unheard of before this time) became the norm in Western Society. This placement of Love before Marriage was a stunning reversal of the presumed natural order. Previously it had been expected that first marriage would come and then love. Now, though, now we think that love has to come first. And only with love may marriage come...
What's odd is that this change doesn't seem to have affected the stability of marriage much. Marriage to someone you know seems to be as workable as marriage to a total stranger. Which may be one of the reasons on line dating services work out so well. Hell Dean married someone who was virtually a total stranger. Seems to have worked out...
What we see then is that Love is the Western basis for Marriage. Marriage is the basis of Family, and Family is the basis of Society. Pretty much by excluding anyone from marriage, we are telling them that they cannot be part of Society. And yet we do this to Gays...
If love is the basis for marriage, and gays love each other, then who are we to say that their love should not be given the same legal rights as Heterosexual love? If a deity causes love (a point I am not qualified to make) then who are we to oppose that deity? There is simply no conceivable reason to me why we should stand for the State operating in a discriminatory manner...
If, as some claim, Homosexuality is against some Deity or another, let the individuals take that up with their gods. Or, better yet, let the gods take it up with those individuals...
Love between adults cannot be harmful to society. Love between adultsalmost definitionalystrengthens society. It seems insane to say that one kind of adult love would be considered worthy of official notice, while another should be held up for contempt...
Posted by Andrew at January 28, 2004 03:30 PM
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